RichardKennaway comments on Systems Theory Terms - Less Wrong

14 Post author: ScottL 20 November 2015 12:50PM

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Comment author: RichardKennaway 27 November 2015 11:21:33AM 0 points [-]

The thing for a scientist to do is to discover the mechanism

If you believe that's the only thing scientists are allowed to do then they won't be able to do work where predictions can be made but where the underlying mechanism is illusive.

"Discover", not "have discovered". Newton's work was a step; Einstein finding more of a mechanism was a further step.

I think that "finding out how things work" should not be the goal of science. The goal should be to develop models that provide reliable and useful predictions.

It's difficult to get the latter without the former, if you want to make successful way-out-of-sample predictions. Otherwise, you're stuck in the morass of trying to find tiny signals and dismissing most of your data as noise.

Comment author: ChristianKl 27 November 2015 02:14:39PM 1 point [-]

It's difficult to get the latter without the former, if you want to make successful way-out-of-sample predictions.

I think you can do a lot of successful predictions with IQ without knowing the mechanism of IQ. I don't think you build better IQ tests by going into neuroscience but giving the tests to people and seeing how different variables correlate with each other.

Otherwise, you're stuck in the morass of trying to find tiny signals and dismissing most of your data as noise.

I don't think that's true. The present approach of putting compounds through massive screening arrays based on theoretical reasoning that it's good to hit certain biochemical pathways is very noise-laden and produces a lot of false positives. >90% of drug candidats that get put into trials don't work out.

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